Windows Task Manager Tutorial

Operating systems done jobs by running processes and tasks. One of the primary duty for an operating system is management of processes. All operating systems have different type of task manager. Windows have builtin task manager maned Task Manager . In this tutorial we will look detailed about Windows Task Manager.

Start Task Manager

There are different ways to start Task Manager. One way is using Run command box providing taskmgr like below.

Another way is Right click to Task Bar and click to the Task Manager .

Applications

Applications tab provides currently running User space graphical applications. In a system actually there a lot of applications running but only some of them are GUI applications directly interacted by user. This tab lists these applications. We can see from the example that user is currently running Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome .

Process

Processes tab will list all processes those are running on the system. Some processes may be running on the background. There are following information about processes

Image Name columns shows processes exe name

User Name column shows the user who owns and started the process

CPU column shows the CPU usage percentage of the process

Memory columns show the memory usage of the process

Description column show more detail about the process

Add New Column

We can also add new column to get different information about processes. In order to add column we need to list avaible columns with View -> Select Columns... like below.

In this window we can select which columns we want to list just by checking. Important of the columns are;

CPU Time

Threads

I/O Reads

I/O Writes

Command Line

Show Processes From All Users

By default task manager will only list processes owned by current user. In our example current user is ismail . But we may need other user processes to list. This can be done with the checkbox below left corner. This will list all users like SYSTEM . NETWORK , LOCAL SERVICE and other normal users.

There is also information about total process numbers, total CPU usage and memory usage.

Services

Services or daemon generally works background. Services do not need any GUI. Services also runs always not like a processes. Because process starts and ends in some time. We can list services with Task Manager in the Services tab

Name column shows name of the service

PID column shows process ID of the service

Description column shows more information about the service

Status column shows the current working condition like Stopped or Running of service

Group column shows related group of the service

Performance

Task Manager also provides information about the system resources. Task Manager provides load information about CPU, Memory. There are following information;

CPU Usage

CPU Usage History

Physical Memory

Total

Cached

Available

Free

Threads

Process

Uptime

Networking

In the networking tab the network interfaces listed as graphs and their network speed and usage percentage are shown. There is also information like network interface connection status, link speed